I believe this is the third Region A release of this film, and each one is still botched in some way. I have the 2009 release, but none of them are definitive, correct?

Correct. I've been sort of following this thread over on Blu-ray.com, because I love drama. Kino was given access the overly-yellow transfer used on the previous blu-ray release. To compensate, they've uniformly turned the yellow levels down across the entire film. Depends who you ask on whether they've done a good job or not, but nobody is arguing that this is ideal. There are also complaints about compression artefacts, crushed blacks, and other fun stuff which may or may not bother you. They also buggered up porting over the old blu-ray extras so they stutter.

There is also the issue of calling their cut the "Original U.S. Theatrical Cut", as what they've done is approximated it, and there are some (minor) issues with what they've done.

My issue with what I see here in the review screenshots is that most of the caps still show this desaturated milky look which is a definite part of how Bologna currently grades their color restorations if left to do the grading.

This being written, though the intensity of the specificity of the grading for TGTBTU is higher, if Wake Up & Kill and Deep Red italian yellow + milky blacks color gradings were able to be corrected, surely, TGTBTU could and should have been better corrected than that.

kidc85 wrote:

They also buggered up porting over the old blu-ray extras so they stutter.

This is probably my favourite part, because while fixing a FUBAR color timing certainly is a complex task, porting over decade old SD extras wasn't easy enough for Kino so they managed to even fudge that.

The most baffling part was seeing how Mister Lime was defending the release after that. Without giving an actual defense, it all basically boiled down to "I don't know why you guys are making a fuss about the color, look at all these extras we got!"

He then proceeded to get into a name-calling fight with another poster and proclaim "if I would have known this release would have made this many people unhappy, I wish we would have passed this on to the second highest bidder."

"if I would have known this release would have made this many people unhappy, I wish we would have passed this on to the second highest bidder."

Poor Kino. As the victims in all this, I hope they don't suffer too badly from all the turbulence and vitriol swirling around this unforeseeable, and unavoidable act of God.

They are clearly an innocent, passive bystander, caught between the vicious, evil, release......and the "people", (usually referred to as "customers"), who are completely unhappy for mysterious, unknown reasons.

Here's some classic MisterLime quotes over at TGTBTU forum at Blu-Ray.com:

MisterLime wrote:

"I thought you guys were arguing that it wasn't BLUE enough, all those post of the '98 DVD as comparisons. Now, its too blue, how could I take any of this seriously?"

MisterLime wrote:

This was the largest advance we ever paid for studio title and after acquiring the film we found out a few people weren't happy with the color grading of the 4K master, we did what we could to make some needed adjustments and shared the before-and-after captures with the fans months before the release - which was probably a mistake, most loved it and thanked us and others continued on the attacks. We recreated the 162-minute cut, we tried to stay as true to the theatrical cut as possible, replacing wipe edits with cuts and vice versa, reinserting an optical flip edit, adding the original 1967 UA logo and more. But for some reason some people expected us do a new ‘high six-figure’ 4K restoration in Italy. And even if we wanted to do a new transfer, we would need the permission of the Italian rights holder, who hold all the film elements and they already think they have a perfect master supervised and color graded by the film's assistant cameraman.

This film (162-minute cut) is probably one of my top 5 or 10 favorite movies of all time, I could not wait to announce this title and could not believe I was gonna work on one of my all time favorites. But in hindsight, I wish we would’ve fought for the other two titles we ending up losing and left these to the second highest bidder, even though the release will most likely become our biggest seller of all time. These venomous posts which have been piling up for months almost got the best of me a few months ago and today it kind of did after I read pages of these repetitive single-day posts.

MisterLime wrote:

Perfect example of another misinformed post. We outbid another company because we were passionate about the film, we spend months creating the edit, fixing what we could fix and added some cool extras, delayed the release twice because of these issues and to get a couple of extras we ended up not getting. Do you even know what it takes to release a 2 disc set loaded with extras? No one had seen the 162 minute THEATRICAL CUT in HD and no one had released it on DVD since the early 2000s.

MisterLime wrote:

For all the people canceling their orders, I guess none of you gave a crap about seeing the 162 minute cut again and for the first time in HD. The master was edited from the same 4K master of the 2014 MGM master, with some color correction, we added the original 1967 UA logo, the optical flip sequence and replaced the wipe cuts with actual cuts as they appeared in the theatrical cut.

This is not inspiring very much confidence for their just-about-to-start multi-release deal for the ABC titles. Why do so many of the people who run the US boutique labels react like this to a controversial/problematic release?

Last edited by Ribs on Mon Aug 14, 2017 1:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I believe the theatrical version is available but they didn't want/have the resources to do a full scan/remaster and arbitrarily decided that "first time in HD!" would move units of it so just assembled it out of the 4K restoration of the full version.

I believe the theatrical version is available but they didn't want/have the resources to do a full scan/remaster and arbitrarily decided that "first time in HD!" would move units of it so just assembled it out of the 4K restoration of the full version.

You'd think they'd have the memo about not messing this up framed in their offices. I don't even like Leone's films but to deny their importance and significance to film history is ridiculous. And to mess up this important of a release for fans? I just don't have the words.

This is not inspiring very much confidence for their just-about-to-start multi-release deal for the ABC titles. Why do so many of the people who run the US boutique labels react like this to a controversial/problematic release?

"if I would have known this release would have made this many people unhappy, I wish we would have passed this on to the second highest bidder."

Poor Kino. They are clearly an innocent, passive bystander, caught between the vicious, evil, release......and the "people", (usually referred to as "customers"), who are completely unhappy for unknown reasons.

I suppose this is sarcasm, but Kino most certainly what they were in since most of how they advertised this release was in "we're going to fix this !" and when it turns out not to be the case, well, that's just how things go.

Then, again, they could have fixed the color timing way more than they did.

domino harvey wrote:

Am I reading this right, Kino Lorber re-edited the film and inserted artificially created transitions to "recreate" a different (presumably unavailable) version?

If I have followed this correctly, they took the 4K restoration, removed the yellow tint, then matched the 1998 DVD cut, and then did a few other changes to try and replicate the original real original really real original TC.Which would then be the "First Time in HD !" they advertised.

Ribs wrote:

Why do so many of the people who run the US boutique labels react like this to a controversial/problematic release?

It's not only in the US, believe me. I only know a few labels who take this kind of cases like opportunity for continuous improvement, and these reactions are usually so positively welcomed simply because they're so rare.In the best case, the label is transparent in trying to fix things (and sometimes can and does).In the worst, this is the typical reaction.But most are just in the middle and simply don't react at all.

I believe the theatrical version is available but they didn't want/have the resources to do a full scan/remaster and arbitrarily decided that "first time in HD!" would move units of it so just assembled it out of the 4K restoration of the full version.

Wow, they really don't get it, do they?

Aside from the cost of doing a new scan, new color correction and new digital cleanup of dirt, emulsion digs, etc., all the elements for the U.S. version are a couple of generations down from the original, so they scanned an old I.P. or I.N. of the theatrical cut it would look like crap next to the 4K of the long version.

I believe the theatrical version is available but they didn't want/have the resources to do a full scan/remaster and arbitrarily decided that "first time in HD!" would move units of it so just assembled it out of the 4K restoration of the full version.

Wow, they really don't get it, do they?

Aside from the cost of doing a new scan, new color correction and new digital cleanup of dirt, emulsion digs, etc., all the elements for the U.S. version are a couple of generations down from the original, so they scanned an old I.P. or I.N. of the theatrical cut it would look like crap next to the 4K of the long version.

He's the guy that claims that no one, even Criterion, has more financial resources than Kino.

The edge enhancement on Universal's disc of Barton Fink is disappointing but I still prefer it to Kino's. My copy of Duel in the Sun has already shipped from wowHD but if a UK label does Duel better in the future, I'll buy it for a third time. I'm hoping Kino's disc of Son of Paleface turns out well..

Joined: Wed Apr 28, 2010 12:04 pmLocation: A Midland town spread and darkened into a city

Judging from the irises of the actors (which is what I always check), the Blu-ray appears to be the more accurate one. The fact that this transfer looks as good as it does is a bit of a shock given the other recent Kino releases.